Police hit on ‘surprisingly effective’ method to get offenders to hand themselves in

Sussex Police have discovered what they call a "surprisingly effective" method of getting people with outstanding arrest warrants to hand themselves in; they send them a text message.

Assistant Chief Constable Laurence Taylor revealed the tactic at a public meeting on police performance and accountability last week, where he also disclosed that the force currently has 41 outstanding first instance warrants, and 501 outstanding failure to appear warrants.

"The first thing we do when we get a warrant is we put it through the police national computer and on to our systems and then the warrant is sent to either a divisional resource or another force to be executed," he said.

“Then there’s a whole raft of activity we undertake with address checks, we text message the offender and ask them to give themselves up, and you’d be surprised how effective that is.

“It goes on our briefing systems, we use the media, we visit places of employment, we target vehicles that they use, we do checks with the Department for Work and Pensions, credit checks, a whole range of activities to try and identify those individuals who are outstanding.”

Mr Powling's report on the Sussex Police meeting garnered a great deal of attention after it was shared on Reddit, where some commenters said they weren't surprised by how effective the text messaging was.

One (American?) Redditor who claims to be a defence attorney, Teen_Wolf_of_Wall_St, said: "A significant portion of my clientele will miss or skip a court date, usually for some misdemeanor or driving charge, and then forget about it or put it off until it escapes memory.

"A simple text saying 'Hey turn yourself in or we will serve the warrant' would spur many of them to do just that. Sure if someone is actually trying to hide from the law it will not, but for those who are a victim of their own procrastination yes definitely."